On Nov. 18, 1995, Itzhak Perlman, the
violinist, came on stage to give a concert
at Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center in
New York City. If you have ever been to
a Perlman concert, you know that getting
on stage is no small achievement for him.
He was stricken with polio as a child, and so
he has braces on both legs and walks
with the aid of two crutches.
To see him walk across the stage one
step at a time, painfully and slowly, is
a sight. He walks painfully, yet majestically,
until he reaches his chair. Then he sits down,
slowly, puts his crutches on the floor,
undoes the clasps on his legs, tucks one
foot back and extends the other foot forward.
Then he bends down and picks up the violin, puts
it under his chin, nods to the conductor
and proceeds to play.
By now, the audience is used to this ritual.
They sit quietly while he makes his way
across the stage to his chair. They remain
reverently silent while he undoes the clasps
on his legs. They wait until he is ready to
play. But this time, something went wrong.
Just as he finished the first few bars, one
of the strings on his violin broke. You could
hear it snap - it went off like gunfire across
the room. There was no mistaking what
that sound meant. There was no mistaking
what he had to do.
People who were there that night thought
to themselves: "We figured that he would
have to get up, put on the clasps again,
pick up the crutches and limp his way off
stage - to either find another violin or else
find another string for this one." But he
didn't. Instead, he waited a moment, closed
his eyes and then signaled the
conductor to begin again.
The orchestra began, and he played from
where he had left off. And he played with
such passion and such power and such
purity as they had never heard before.
Of course, anyone knows that it is impossible
to play a symphonic work with just three
strings. I know that, and you know
that, but that night Itzhak Perlman refused
to know that. You could see him modulating,
changing, recomposing the piece in his
head. At one point, it sounded like he was
de-tuning the strings to get new sounds
from them that they had never made before.
When he finished, there was an awesome
silence in the room. And then people
rose and cheered. There was an extraordinary
outburst of applause from every corner
of the auditorium. We were all
on our feet, screaming
and cheering, doing everything we
could to show how much we
appreciated what he had done.
He smiled, wiped the sweat from this
brow, raised his bow to quiet us, and
then he said, not boastfully, but in a quiet,
pensive, reverent tone, "You know,
sometimes it is the artist's task to find out
how much music you can still make with
what you have left." What a powerful line
that is. It has stayed in my mind ever
since I heard it. And who knows?
Perhaps that is the way of life - not just
for artists but for all of us. Here is a man
who has prepared all his life to make
music on a violin of four strings, who,
all of a sudden, in the middle of a concert,
finds himself with only three strings. So he
makes music with three strings, and the music
he made that night with just three strings
was more beautiful, more sacred, more
memorable, than any that he had
ever made before, when he had four strings.
So, perhaps our task in this shaky, fast-changing,
bewildering world in which we live is to make
music, at first with all that we have, and then,
when that is no longer possible, to make
music with what we have left.
-- Jack Riemer, Houston Chronicle